The idea of truth has long been subjected to scrutiny by intellectuals, in the 21st century; it is becoming all the more applicable to international politics
Postmodernism, a literary and philosophical movement, had an illustrious legacy of intellectual thinking, but it became popular in the true sense of the term in the 1960s and the subsequent decades. A key aspect of postmodernist thought, especially found in the works of Michel Foucault, Fredrich Nietzsche and Jacques Derrida, is decoding the dimensions of truth.
Truth, for the postmodernist school of thought, is an illusion, postmodernists argue that there is nothing called truth; it is subjective, what appears as the truth is nothing but an assortment of interpretations that depends on the worldview and cognitive disposition of the individual concerned.
This revelation shook the foundations of moral and political philosophy in general and popular culture in particular. The belief that truth is based on relativism began to be applied to different disciplines of study, both in the natural sciences as well as the social sciences. Among the social sciences, International Relations, a sub-discipline of the core discipline of Political Science, began to experience the relativity of truth.
Hence, an examination of this idea becomes important.
Palestine-whose land, is it?
One of the best yet controversial applications of the relativity of truth can be applied to the land called Palestine. Currently, in the throes of a brutal war which has devastated a part of the land, with more innocent people dying every day, it is a fitting time to analyze this idea. The Jewish nation-state of Israel, which claims the entirety of Palestine as its own, cites religious-historical evidence to support their claims.
Jews, who were the inhabitants of the land called Palestine, were expelled from the region in 70 AD by the Romans; however, small Jewish communities continued to trickle into the land over the centuries. Controversy arose over the 1917 Balfour Declaration, wherein the then foreign minister of Britain promised that Jews will have a homeland of their own.
Tensions continued to rise over the next few decades because Palestine then was largely inhabited by people of Islamic faith, it was in 1948 that the Israel-Palestine problem began with the United Nations partitioning the region and forming Israel. Simon Sebag Montefiore depicts the historical evolution of this region from a western perspective in his tome Jerusalem: The Biography.
As for the Islamic claims over Palestine, the region began experiencing a substantial rise in Muslim population, following the defeat of Christian forces in the second crusade by the forces of Sultan Saladin, who went on to establish a vast empire in the Middle East. Nur-eldeen Masalha, a Palestinian historian and academic, in his book Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History has succinctly captured the history of this eclectic region, highlighting in the process, serious shortcomings in the “mainstream” narratives of the region. With the formation of Israel, the Arab communities living in the region experienced substantial displacement, starting first in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, whose effects are continuing even to this day.
As it appears, any possible resolution of this dispute appears to be very bleak.
Politics of terrorism
Another key issue of “truth” in the realm of international politics is the lack of a universal definition of terrorism. The Comprehensive Convention on International Terrorism, pioneered by India in 1996, has generated ubiquitous debate in the United Nations, but is yet to be adopted.
In the absence of a formally and internationally agreed definition, what shall be the definition of terrorism? It needs to be borne in mind that terrorism is like the relativity of truth, it depends on varying interpretations by different groups and individuals, located in different socio-cultural contexts. For instance, Nelson Mandela, one of the most revered political personalities in the world who became the first black president of South Africa was dubbed a “terrorist” by the apartheid regime of South Africa and was incarcerated for 27 years, before being released in 1993, an even more astonishing fact was that the US government had Mandela on its terrorist watch list until 2008.
Similarly, the America and many of its allies, particularly Israel has designated IRGC or the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the primary branch of the Iranian armed forces, as a “foreign terrorist organization”.
It is in this context that a very amusing thing about truth in the context of international relations needs to be observed-it can be broken, molded and recast in any form spatially and temporally. This is because truth, which relies on facts, differs for every person and in today’s day and age, the notion of truth has ceded space to post-truth, where through sophisticated means, both state and non-state actors are very easily setting the narratives on different issues. Thereby changing the very subject matter of what truth is.
Therefore, this debate about the content and authenticity of truth will continue to animate discussions and events for years to come, particularly in the field of international relations.
Pranay Kumar Shome, a research analyst who is a PhD candidate at Mahatma Gandhi Central University, Bihar, India
